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SAN DIEGO, Feb. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A study of Associated Press news reports about Israel-Palestine found that AP headlines reported on Israeli deaths at a rate four times greater than they reported on Palestinian deaths.

Reports on Israeli deaths were almost three times longer than reports on Palestinian deaths, and the reports often left out essential context.

The main bureau for the region is in Israel and many of its editors or their family members are Israeli citizens who have served in the Israeli military.

News from the West Bank and Gaza is phoned in to this bureau, where its editors write the reports that are sent out on the wire.
The study examined AP reports on deaths from January 1 through February 7, 2018.

The study found that AP articles on Palestinian deaths tended to be impersonal or negative, while for Israelis they were personalized or sympathetic and contained more details.

Other news sources often shed different light on the incidents, using eyewitness accounts of brutality on the part of Israeli soldiers and other details omitted by AP.

For example, one AP report says Israeli forces "raided a home…killing a Palestinian suspect in a firefight." Another source adds that they killed the wrong man.

AP stories about a 16-year-old imprisoned by Israel for slapping a soldier frequently omitted the fact that this occurred after Israeli soldiers had shot the girl's cousin in the face.

While AP articles often provided contextual information, this never included the fact that the U.S. gives Israel $10 million per day.

"Without this information," the report notes, "American readers will incorrectly feel this is a foreign issue that has nothing to do with them."

The study found: "Basic information that would give the reader an understanding of the context of the hostility was absent."

None of the reports included the words "occupied" or "occupation." The report noted: "Omitting the fact that Palestinians are living under Israeli military control leaves readers ignorant of one of the most significant aspects of the conflict."

The study was conducted by If Americans Knew, a nonprofit that focuses on Israel-Palestine. Executive Director Alison Weir, a former newspaper editor, observes: "AP normally provides excellent, unbiased reporting. It needs to do so on Israel-Palestine."

Figure for U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan since 2001 reflects costs that aren’t in Pentagon calculations

WASHINGTON—U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $5.6 trillion since they began in 2001, according to a new study, a figure more than three times that of the Pentagon’s own estimates.

The Defense Department earlier this year estimated that the total cost of the conflicts since the 2001 attacks has amounted to about $1.5 trillion.

The new study, by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, aims to reflect costs the Pentagon doesn’t include in its own calculations, since war costs aren’t borne by the Defense Department alone. As such, said the study’s author, Neta Crawford, the analysis isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

“War costs are more than what we spend in any one year on what’s called the pointy end of the spear,” she said in an interview. “There are all these other costs behind the spear, and there are consequences of using it, that we need to include.”

For example, the study’s estimates include recurring expenses such as long-term medical care for veterans and war costs incurred by the State Department. Costs also reflect related spending by the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and others.

However, the study doesn’t include other U.S. operations, such as assistance to the Philippines in a fight against Islamic State affiliates there, or other countries in Africa and Europe.

Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.) said studies such as the Brown report are critical because they show the true costs of war, as Congress debates budgets, tax cuts and wartime policies.

“I think it is very important because it describes and quantifies the costs beyond just the narrow bounds of the Department of Defense,” he said.

The cost of the wars also include borrowing money to pay for them, Mr. Reed said. According to the study, the accumulated interest expenses on the future cost of borrowing money to pay the wars could add an additional $8 trillion to the national debt over the next several decades.

“Even if we stopped [the wars] today, we would add $7.9 trillion to the national debt,” Mr. Reed said.

The Pentagon has said its estimate means that each of the more than 200 million U.S. taxpayers is responsible for about $7,740 in war costs. The Brown University study indicates each taxpayer has incurred nearly $24,000 in expenses.

The Pentagon didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.

Ms. Crawford said the Pentagon wasn’t trying to be deceptive, but that its calculations simply don’t include the “real costs” of war.

For instance, the Pentagon’s estimates of the medical costs focus on care in war zones and immediately afterward, but don’t adequately account for long-term care or the follow-on costs once veterans are under the care of the VA.

Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., said the future health-care cost for veterans is an unknown, but significant, number. The VA budget is growing rapidly, not only because of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but to care for aging Vietnam vets too, Mr. Harrison said.

Likewise, as vets of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars grow older in coming decades, their medical expenses are likely to rise, he said.

“There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what those costs will be,” he said.

The UK has spent £1.75bn ($2.44bn) on air and drone strikes in Iraq and Syria as part of the US-led campaign against Islamic State, the Drone Wars UK group said, based on data it acquired through Freedom of Information requests.

Since August 2014, the Tornado, Typhoon and Reaper aircraft of the Royal Air Force have spent a total of 42,000 hours, or almost five years, in the air. That alone cost the taxpayers around £1.5 billion, Drone Wars said. The group estimates it costs £80,000 to keep the multirole fighter Typhoon airborne for 60 minutes, and the per-hour price of operating Tornado and Reaper planes stands at £35,000 and £3,500, respectively. Besides fuel, the calculations include crew, maintenance and capital costs – which are absent from official estimates.

The cost of the munitions fired by the UK warplanes and drones during Operation Shader, which is the collective name of the ongoing UK involvement in Iraq and Syria, has reached £268 million, the information received by Drone Wars UK revealed. The British pilots have carried out 1,700 airstrikes in Syria and Iraq over the last three and a half years, dropping 3,545 bombs and missiles.

Paveway IV dual mode GPS and laser-guided bombs have been the most widely used weapons, with 2,329 units (priced at £70,000 each) fired. The most expensive piece of munitions employed as part of the campaign against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) was the Storm Shadow cruise missile. With each unit priced at £800,000 per unit, its eight launches cost around £6.4 million.

Drone Wars UK pointed out that their report only covered air strikes and that “the overall cost of UK military operations in Iraq and Syria will be much higher.” The group argued that the net cost of Operation Shader provided by the government last year didn’t cover all the expenses.

In October, the UK Defense Ministry said that the “total net cost of operations against Daesh (Arabic acronym for IS) in Iraq and Syria is £779 million, which includes operational allowances, accommodation and feeding support for the thousands of personnel who have served on Operation Shader, as well as costs associated with air operations including fuel and precision guided munitions.”

A fat-soluble extract of garlic removed 100 percent of warts and almost all corns in one to two weeks in a clinical study published in the International Journal of Dermatology.

A water extract of garlic removed small warts and reduced the size of larger ones, but was not as effective as garlic dissolved in chloroform and methanol.

The study was conducted by Iranian researchers from Shiraz University in 2005.

33 participants with multiple warts were divided into three groups. In the first group, researchers applied a water extract of garlic to the warts twice a day. In the second group, they applied a fat-soluble extract of garlic twice a day.

In the third group, patients were treated with the lipid solvent (chloroform and methanol) without garlic to eliminate the possibility that it was the solvent, rather than the garlic removing the warts.

After 2 months of the garlic-water extract treatment, only small warts disappeared and larger ones were only partially improved.

The chloroform/methanol control group showed no improvement.
The fat-soluble garlic extract caused every single wart (on 23 patients with between two and 96 warts each) to disappear completely in less than two weeks. Seven out of nine patients with corns showed complete recovery from this treatment.

Selected participants had no wart treatment for at least two months before the study and many of them had failed to respond to conventional treatments in the past.

Dermatologist Farzaneh Dehghani, who led the study, noted that conventional treatments including electrocautery, cryotherapy or keratolytics are not always successful and that warts often reappear.

There was no recurrence of warts in a follow-up 4 months after the garlic study.

Removal of corns usually involves painful, costly surgery.

“Treatment with garlic extract appears to be a more convenient modality,” Dehghani said.